Cassius loved magic, and his trick looked professional, winning instant applause from the audience. But what no one at the time realized—or would recognize for some time to come—was that his life had come to resemble his magic. A good magician makes you see what he wants you to see, concealing from your gaze what he wants to hide. He is like a great boxer who, as former light-heavyweight champion José Torres once suggested, lies for a living. “Champions and good fighters are champions and good fighters because they can lie better than the others. The first thing you learn in the gym is that you have to have a double personality if you are to become a good fighter.” Torres understood that to reach a championship level, a boxer had to employ feints and fakes to make his opponent look at one hand when he was about to get hit with the other.11
Cassius, too, had a deceptive personality. At the beginning of 1963, Cassius’s magic showed the world a buffoonish, loudmouth clown while hiding his growing relationship with Malcolm X and his inner feelings about race in America. In public, he shouted, “I am the greatest!” repeating doggerel and refining his Gorgeous George routine. In private, he attended Nation of Islam meetings and memorized the speeches of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Inside Cassius Clay was Muhammad Ali, but for the moment the magician kept that identity hidden.
TWO DAYS AFTER appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, Clay traveled to Albany, where the movement to abolish boxing in New York had collided with an army of boxers, baseball players, and journalists. Before a joint legislative committee conducting a hearing into the sport, they formed a line of defense against the politicians, moralists, and reformers out to ban the sweet science. Boxing in New York was cleaner than anywhere else in the world, said Melvin Krulewitch, the New York State Athletic Commission chairman. Boxing is safer than baseball, judged Gil McDougald, former New York Yankee infielder. Boxing “is one area of the sports world where equal opportunity is granted to members of my race,” commented James Hicks of the New York Amsterdam News, adding, “Negroes may not be accepted on the tennis courts of Forest Hills . . . but they are accepted as equals in the boxing ring.”12
After almost a decade of close scrutiny and a year of hostile attacks, the sport seemed to be slowly rebounding from its lowest point. Dressed in a dark suit and bow tie, Cassius Clay lectured the committee on the history of pugilism. “Boxing is in the winter of its life now. In the time when there were great fighters like Dempsey and Joe Louis, nobody talked against it. When there are no great fighters, people lose interest.” Boxing was like the march of the seasons. “In the winter, things are cold, things are dead. Spring will come again, and so will summer.”13
Clay himself was the warm breeze of spring, he made perfectly clear. “I am here to liven things up. On March 13, I will be fighting in the Garden, and it will be a total sellout.” After answering a few of the committee’s questions, Cassius concluded his testimony. “When he stepped down,” journalist A. J. Liebling observed, “a faint odor of hubris, like Lilac Végétal, lingered behind.”14
The whiff of spring might have lingered in the committee room, but not Clay, who immediately departed the frigid weather of Albany for the sunshine of Miami. On the first leg of the trip, he rode a train back to New York City. Sitting alone, he stared out the window, looking up at the sky and attempting, it seemed, to see beyond the clouds into the mysteries of space. Growing restless and bored, he switched seats, moving across the aisle to sit next to Frank Deford, a junior sportswriter for Sports Illustrated assigned to cover the hearings on the off chance that anything of note took place.15
Deford assumed that Clay would want to talk about his testimony, the fate of boxing, or his upcoming match against Doug Jones. But Cassius didn’t want to discuss his career. Instead, he grabbed Deford’s notepad and pen and started drawing what looked like an elaborate solar system “with lines and circles indicating descending aliens and something or other about God.” The sportswriter knew nothing about the theology of the Nation of Islam. He had no idea that the boxer sitting three feet away from him was reciting what he had learned from Muslim ministers about the Day of Judgment.
Listening to him, Deford thought that this was just another one of his gimmicks, an amusing tale designed to provoke laughter. As Cassius continued lecturing, though, he realized that this was no joke. Clay sincerely believed this story about a “Mother Ship” descending on Earth, saving the true believers.
When they disembarked at Grand Central Terminal, Deford packed his notepad in his briefcase, shaking his head at the “very amusing but nutty” story Clay had just told him. Later, when he returned home, he tore out the drawings of spaceships and tossed them into the trash. He did not realize that he had thrown away the best evidence that any sportswriter had to prove that Cassius Clay had embraced the Nation of Islam.16
Later in the day, Cassius took another train to Miami, arriving late Friday night. The next day, he returned to the 5th Street Gym to begin training for Jones. As he sparred in the ring, Sonny Liston sauntered in to watch. Liston, who had also arrived on Friday, had come to town to train for his April 4 rematch in Miami with Floyd Patterson. Unconcerned about that fight—he planned to knock out Patterson even “quicker than before”—he decided to scout a future opponent.17
“Get him out of here, that bum is spying on me,” Cassius yelled.